The Nuclear Sacrifice of Our Children: 14 recommendations to help radiation contaminated Japan

When I visited Cuba in 1979, I was struck by the number of roadside billboards that declared ”Our children are our national treasure.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott is a pediatrician specializing in cystic fibrosis and the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, part of a larger umbrella group that was awarded theNobel Peace Prize in 1985.

This resonated with me as a pediatrician, and of course it is true. But as Akio Matsumura said in his article, our children are presently being sacrificed for the political and nuclear agenda of the United Nations, for the political survival of politicians who are mostly male, and for “national security.”

The problem with the world today is that scientists have left the average person way behind in their level of understanding of science, and specifically how the misapplication of science, in particular nuclear science, has and will destroy much of the ecosphere and also human health.

The truth is that most politicians, businessmen, engineers and nuclear physicists have no innate understanding of radiobiology and the way radiation induces cancer, congenital malformations and genetic diseases which are passed generation to generation. Nor do they recognize that children are 20 times more radiosensitive than adults, girls twice as vulnerable as little boys and fetuses much more so.

Hence the response of Japanese politicians to the Fukushima disaster has been ludicrously irresponsible, not just because of their fundamental ignorance but because of their political ties with TEPCO and the nuclear industry which tends to orchestrate a large part of the Japanese political agenda.

Because the Fukushima accident released 2.5 to 3 times more radiation than Chernobyl and because Japan is far more densely populated than the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and because one million people have died within 25 years as a result of Chernobyl, we expect to see more than one million Japanese casualties over the next 25 years. But the incubation time for cancer after radiation exposure varies from 2 to 90 years in this generation. These facts also apply to all future generations in Japan that will be exposed to a radioactive environment and radioactive food.

It seems that the people in charge in Japan are busily ignoring or covering up these ghastly medical predictions and deciding in their ignorance that people can return to live highly contaminated areas or else remain living there. Even areas of Tokyo are recording dangerous radioactive isotopes that originated in Fukushima in house-dust, in plants, and in street soil.

Thyroid cancers related to Chernobyl started appearing only three to four years post-accident (over 92,000 have now been diagnosed). Yet only 12 months post-accident in the Fukushima Prefecture, 36% of 38,000 children under 18 have been diagnosed by ultrasound with thyroid cysts or nodules (most of these lesions should be biopsied to exclude malignancy). This short incubation time would indicate that these children almost certainly received a very high dose of thyroid radiation from inhaled and ingested radioactive iodine.

These results bode ill for the development of other cancers because hundreds of other radioactive elements escaped which are now concentrating in food, fish and human bodies and inhaled into the lungs. Some elements are radioactive for minutes but many remain radioactive for hundreds to thousands of years meaning much of the Japanese food will remain radioactive for generations to come. Nuclear accidents therefore never end. 40% of the European landmass is still radioactive and will remain so for millennia.

So what should happen in Japan? These are my recommendations.

All areas of Japan should be tested to assess how radioactive the soil and water are because the winds can blow the radioactive pollution hundreds of miles from the point source at Fukushima.

Under no circumstances should radioactive rubbish and debris be incinerated as this simply spreads the isotopes far and wide to re-concentrate in food and fish.

All batches of food must be adequately tested for specific radioactive elements using spectrometers.

No radioactive food must be sold or consumed, nor must radioactive food be diluted for sale with non-radioactive food as radioactive elements re-concentrate in various bodily organs.

All water used for human consumption should be tested weekly.

All fish caught off the east coast must be tested for years to come.

All people, particularly children, pregnant women and women of childbearing age still living in high radiation zones should be immediately evacuated to non-radioactive areas of Japan.

All people who have been exposed to radiation from Fukushima — particularly babies, children, immunosuppressed, old people and others — must be medically thoroughly and routinely examined for malignancy, bone marrow suppression, diabetes, thyroid abnormalities, heart disease, premature aging, and cataracts for the rest of their lives and appropriate treatment instituted. Leukemia will start to manifest within the next couple of years, peak at five years and solid cancers will start appearing 10 to 15 years post-accident and will continue to increase in frequency in this generation over the next 70 to 90 years.

All physicians and medical care providers in Japan must read and examine Chernobyl–Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by the New York Academy of Sciences to understand the true medical gravity of the situation they face.

I also suggest with humility that doctors in particular but also politicians and the general public refer to my web page, nuclearfreeplanet.org for more information, that they listen to the interviews related to Fukushima and Chernobyl on my radio program at ifyoulovethisplanet.org and they read my book NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER.

The international medical community and in particular the WHO must be mobilized immediately to assist the Japanese medical profession and politicians to implement this massive task outlined above.

The Japanese government must be willing to accept international advice and help.

As a matter of extreme urgency Japan must request and receive international advice and help from the IAEA and the NRC in the U.S., and nuclear specialists from Canada, Europe, etc., to prevent the collapse of Fukushima Dai-ichi Unit 4 and the spent fuel pool if there was an earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale.As the fuel pool crashed to earth it would heat and burn causing a massive radioactive release 10 times larger than the release from Chernobyl. There is no time to spare and at the moment the world community sits passively by waiting for catastrophe to happen.

The international and Japanese media must immediately start reporting the facts from Japan as outlined above. Not to do so is courting global disaster.

Dr. Helen Caldicott is a pediatrician specializing in cystic fibrosis and the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which as part of a larger group was awarded theNobel Peace Prize in 1985. Please visit her website.

It is incredibly frustrating to watch Fukushima’s nuclear power plants continue to spew into air, ocean, lakes, rivers, onto agricultural land, into the forests, through air filters, into swimming pools, onto vegetable gardens in other countries… and see no concerted international efforts to make a real difference. It’s all very criminal – crimes against humanity are being committed. Where are the flotillas? Where are the teams of international doctors? Why are the culprits still walking free? The people of Fukushima need to be moved and provided real health care based on the hippocratic oath all doctors have to take – TEPCO and Japan gov need to pay for these actions. Now.

Two negative comments :
Europe landmass is 40 % contaminated, may be but to what extent ?
I am european, I live often in Europe, I know a bit about it and what still should not be eaten in France, or in Germany, or from Ukraine, Turkey etc.. and when I see you bang on the table and say “don’t eat food from Europe” I think you’re wrong to speak that way. It’s like you were using the “nuclear threat” in your fight.

Second it seems you have a poor understanding of the japanese politics. You give “sensible advice” to a country ruled with an iron hand under the democratic velvet glove. Japan has a rotten politics. The prefectures that avoided the plume are asking to inport radioactive waste : debris, soil and so on to burn it on their ground. Follow the money. What’s the use of your advices, if I may ask.

BTW France has opted for a slow shift out of nuclear energy, I just hope it won’t be too slow.

In light of the election result especially, Japan is now at a crossroads that could determine its future to an equal or greater extent than December 7 1941. On that date Japan, despite its undoubted technical brilliance and social cohesion, after a long period of descent into political extremism and strategic folly, crossed the point of no return into disaster that almost destroyed it, and cost it its Empire, and much of its wealth and position in the world, as well as millions of lives. It did so lulled into a false sense of overconfidence and security, partly by the world situation, and actions of others, but decisively by its own at the time excessive arrogance and shortsightedness, combined with a social-political conformity that whilst a great strength in normal times and constructively applied, can become a possibly fatal liability in circumstances of exceptional risk and crisis. Now is one such time. Japan faces an extreme risk of national disaster by the fragile situation at Fukushima, which one more large quake could turn into a major nuclear catastrophe beyond anything yet seen, and which could be destructive on a global scale. The amount of toxic radioactive isotopes that could be released if the fuel assemblies are exposed in the event of cooling failure due to another possible even likely large seismic disturbance are by all credible accounts enough to render much of Japan uninhabitable for centuries at least, as well as poison tens of millions of people within and beyond Japan. It must be the no. 1 priority of the new government to take all possible prudent action to reduce and eliminate this threat as urgently as practicable, every day lost could be the last. It has been quoted in the media that there are plans to remove the fuel assemblies by 2014, this is at least one year too late, it should already have been done. And furthermore, Japan’s nuclear industry must be upgraded and rendered safe such that another such disaster is not merely unlikely, but impossible. It was thought such a disaster would not occur, but it did. That means it can certainly happen again. The reactor design was and remains a poor one with enormous safety liabilities, an urgent priority should be to a) shut down any plants that are at serious (ie similar) risk of natural disaster, b) render fuel assemblies safe and adequately dispersed to prevent the possibility of another such disaster, and c) introduce new and safer plant designs. An overall threat assessment in light of the unforeseen events and revised contingency planning would also be in order. The new government must not go back to ‘business as usual’, for that would clearly and forseeably be to risk a repeat on an even more devastating scale.

JAPAN WAKE UP NOW TO THE MASSIVE RISK OF RENEWED AND EVEN NATIONALLY FATAL DISASTER!

JAPANESE LEADERS AND PEOPLE TAKE ESSENTIAL PREVENTIVE ACTION NOW WHILE THERE IS TIME!

DO NOT LET PETTY CONSIDERATIONS OF ANY SORT OBSTRUCT VITAL ACTION!

JAPAN IS AT THE CROSSROADS AGAIN, THIS TIME CHOOSE THE RIGHT AND SOUND COURSE!

DO NOT LET THIS GOVERNMENT GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS JAPAN’S LAST AND MOST RECKLESS!

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Akio and President Gorbachev

Senator Claiborne Pell and Akio

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Akio and Chairman Arafat

Finding the Missing Link is a project by Akio Matsumura and Chris Cote to connect people, information, and ideas to provide effective and innovative solutions to new types of international problems. Read more.